The ICEF i-graduate Agent Barometer, now in its sixth year, has elicited a record number of agent responses (1023 from 107 nationalities) for its 2012 edition, providing a robust and comprehensive understanding of the international education market as seen through the eyes of education agents.
It is a great year to have such excellent participation in the survey, given the turbulence we saw quite frequently throughout the year in leading higher education markets. Various countries seemed to become either more welcoming or less so to international students as a result of such things as visa policies, national immigration climates, government/industry collaboration, marketing activities/bilateral agreements, and safety issues. Did such a year affect the attractiveness of the usual leading country’s appeal to international students, according to agents? To some extent yes, and to some extent, no.

Canada stands to benefit greatly from an immigration program that, since 2009, has been fast-tracking thousands of prospective residents who have done post-secondary studies in the country.
But there are perils for Canadian academia and for the excellent reputation of Canadian educators if some students are only seeking to exploit the new rules to avoid the usual immigration checks and enter Canada through a back door, rather than to gain an education.
The question arises because foreign students now have the right to work while studying in Canada and for as long as three years afterwards and, for the first time, they can apply for permanent residency from within Canada.
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/benefits+risks+foreign+students/7449440/story.html#ixzz2ARggImyo

It may not be obvious why Canada needs to think much about Bologna – we already have a common higher education area, right? – but the fact is that we do. Partly, it’s a matter of long-term market-protection; as time goes on and elements of the Bologna approach becomes more common around the world (experiments with Bologna-like structures are occurring on more or less every continent, and even in the United States), institutions wishing to attract foreign students may eventually have trouble doing so if they aren’t Bologna-compliant. But there are some short-term reasons to think about it, too – mostly because of some trade negotiations you may only barely have heard about.
A couple of years ago, Canada began negotiating the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, or CETA. In addition to its usual strategy of not saying anything in public ever about anything, the Harper government has been extra shtum about CETA, presumably to try to keep the Maude Barlow brigade at bay. But in many ways, this is a much more far-reaching agreement any of the previous FTAs with the U.S., Mexico or whoever because they are actually talking seriously about allowing the free movement of labour.

At a time when some American institutions seem to be moving away from the liberal-arts model, under pressure for more specialized or vocational education, it is heartening to see that Asian institutions and governments are turning toward liberal-arts and science education. Asian higher education has generally demanded early specialization. But these Asian educators and administrators have realized the importance of a broader sort of education intended to promote flexibility, critical thinking, and acquaintance with broad spans of human knowledge.

Iran has always had a unique role to play in the study abroad industry, but recent events surrounding currency fluctuations and restricted fields of study have shown the market to be even more of a challenge.
Approximately 35,000 Iranian students are believed to be studying abroad this year, according to government figures, providing the economy with important skills and maintaining a link between the country and the rest of the world as it becomes increasingly isolated internationally.
Places in Iran’s top public universities, determined by a national entrance exam, are extremely competitive, and lucrative fields such as medicine are difficult to get into. For those whose families can afford it, studying abroad can be a different avenue to earning a prestigious degree, putting students in line for the best jobs when they return home.

Ottawa – Canada is increasingly an education destination of choice for top university students around the world. New university enrolment figures from all provinces except Quebec show that the number of international students in these provinces has increased 12 percent this fall. (Quebec figures are expected in November.)
The increases in international student enrolment are reflected in the growth of Canadian students as well, with an increase of 3.4 percent in the graduate student population and two percent among undergraduates.
AUCC says that the overall upward trend in enrolment demonstrates the value that students continue to put on higher education in Canada.
According to federal government estimates, 75 percent of new jobs in the coming decade will require postsecondary education. Between 2010 and 2020, AUCC estimates there will be 2.1 million jobs created for university graduates. During their careers university graduates will typically earn $1.3 million more than those with a high-school education alone. The lifetime income advantage for a bachelor’s graduate over a registered tradesperson or college grad working full-time is $1 million.

They’ve dreamed of your campus. They’ve saved their money. They’ve braved the long flight and packed all that you told them to pack. Now here they are on campus, your international students. They’re excited and … scared. They’ve seen some impressive things in their first few days at your school. Now, they want nothing more than to curl up in their residence beds and text their friends and families back home.
Of course they’re experiencing culture shock, the stages of which are said to be honeymoon, frustration, understanding, and finally acclimation. Most international students will experience culture shock, and most will get through it in time. However, the way in which an institution supports – or doesn’t support – its international students through culture shock can make a real difference in how these students form their first impressions of, and lasting associations with, an institution. Helping students through culture shock is the first step to setting them on a path to success in their studies and to a feeling of overall satisfaction at an institution.

After two trade missions to Asia in as many months, Prime Minister Stephen Harper signalled that Canada’s economic future should be less reliant on the United States and more focused on opportunities with Asia. A number of recent reports have underscored the economic benefit to Canada of increasing trade with Asia, and the new task force report for the federal government entitled International Education, a Key Driver of Canada’s Future Prosperity speaks to the importance of positioning and branding Canada’s higher education internationally.

Although few Canadians attended the AIEC conference in Melbourne two weeks ago, Canada was on people's minds during its discussions. Likewise in print: a recent report commissioned by the Australian newspaper that identifies challenges to and opportunities for the Australian HE sector through interviews with senior staff notes that 'Canada was considered a serious competitor by half of the respondents, with potential to be an almost even match to Australia should it move to a national education system…. “They have provincial education systems so they tend not to be as well organised in terms of promotion and would be relatively the same as Australia except they are cold.”’

GURGAON, India - The University of Windsor has recruited 2,000 Indian students and nearly 6,000 overseas students since deciding 15 years ago to become "Canada's leading international university."
And this was only the beginning of the school's global recruitment drive, said Dr. Majid Ahmadi, who runs Windsor's graduate engineering programs.
"Three years ago we took 70 to 75 Indian students in engineering. It has now more than doubled to 180," Ahmadi said last Friday at a students' fair attended by a dozen universities and colleges from the University of Victoria on the Pacific to Halifax's St. Mary's University on the Atlantic.
Read more: http://www.canada.com/Canadian+universities+sights+students+from+India/7427728/story.html#ixzz2ARnJFMsB

In this second ICEF Monitor article, we profile the particular needs these interns have, as well as concrete ways in which educational institutions are helping them to achieve their goals.
Preparing to intern abroad
For a successful international internship, the key ingredient is preparation, says Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer at Level 3 Communications. â€œWhile there is a certain allure to international study or international work, there is a lot of work that must be done before that can be realised.â€
Perhaps the most important form of preparation is thorough research about the opportunities open to students who want to intern outside of their home country.
Many students will miss these opportunities simply because they are not aware of them.
A study by the German â€œExpert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration,â€ conducted among international students in various countries, found that between a third and a half of students across countries felt insufficiently informed about the possibilities for work in their country of study. Three quarters of students surveyed felt that information about these opportunities was difficult to access.

International students have ranked the UK as the safest place to study because of its multicultural society, the perception that people don’t carry guns and its good medical care, according to new data from the British Council’s Student Insights survey.

The face of Maritime campuses is changing.
The number of international students attending Maritime universities has more than doubled in the last ten years. They are becoming more multi-cultural and many universities are banking on foreign students to boost enrolment.
"Five years ago, or three years ago, you will not find any student from Saudi, but now especially in this year, there are a lot lot of them," said Fahad Al Khayri, a 24 year old chemistry student from Saudi Arabia. He is one of nearly 9,000 international students enrolled at a university in the Maritimes, a trend that has seen increases in the last few years.
Since 2006, the number of international students at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton has risen by 150 students, that's 11 per cent of the total student population. At the UNB campus in Saint John, the figure is about 18 per cent.

AM standing near the southern tip of Africa with the great mass of Table Mountain at my back. To the north, the sub-Saharan Africa stretches into the distance.
Cape Town has just hosted a conference attended by higher education chiefs from Africa and the rest of the world. They all share the hope that internationalisation of higher education will catalyse reform and economic development across the continent.
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For the first time, foreign students in Australia have their own ‘bill of rights’. This follows the release by the Australian Human Rights Commission of a set of principles to promote and protect the rights of international students, which it says have too often been ignored by individuals and organisations.
Outlining the principles at an international conference in Melbourne last week, Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Helen Szoke said the aim was to create discussion and awareness of student rights “where sometimes it does not exist”.
“This awareness is essential, whether in terms of the obligations of organisations working with international students, or of the support students should expect during their time here,” Szoke said.

The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, highlights Canada’s well-established relationship with Saudi Arabia in the medical field. Over the past 30 years, Canada has trained more than 4,000 Saudi physicians, including the Minister of Health. More Saudi doctors are currently being trained in Canada than anywhere else in the world—some 900 doctors, with the majority being trained as specialists.

As international migration has risen in recent decades, the proportion of migrants with university degrees has also increased – with the most recent migrants to developed countries likely to be the best educated – according to just-released statistics from the OECD.
One third of immigrants who arrived less than five years ago in OECD countries, or some 5.2 million people, are tertiary educated. This has enormous human capital implications for both sending and destination countries.
“On average, the proportion of higher education graduates is greater among recent immigrants than for the native-born populations of the OECD countries (24%) or for longer standing immigrant communities (27%),” according to an OECD report presented at a conference held on 5 October in Paris, on identifying and better using migrants’ skills.

Dubai: The student population in the GCC has been steadily increasing and is expected to reach 11.3 million in 2020, from 9.5 million in 2010.
An increased demand for higher education, particularly in the UAE, has come from a rise in the number of students.
The UAE’s private education sector is the biggest in the region with an estimated value of $2.8 billion (Dh10.2 million).
As an initiative to support the sustained growth of the academic sector in the UAE and across the GCC, GETEX Autumn 2012 will showcase a wide selection of higher education and professional development programmes, including graduate and postgraduate degrees along with vocational and professional courses.

THE Immigration Department cancelled more than 10,000 student visas in the past financial year, with many students failing to fulfil course requirements.
The department revoked 2219 student visas in 2011/12 for failure to meet course progress or attendance benchmarks.
Two visas were cancelled on character grounds and 15 visas withdrawn for providing wrong information or bogus documents. A department spokesman said student visas were also cancelled if the holders falsely claimed to be students.
The department cancelled 3107 visas for non-genuine students, breaches of visa conditions and voluntary requests for cancellation. The department is currently compiling figures for the previous financial year.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has introduced a set of principles to promote and protect the rights of international students and inform those who work with them. They are designed to make students aware of their rights when studying abroad as well as prevent economic insecurity, threats to safety and social isolation.

The British government categorises around quarter of a million people arriving in the country each year as non-EU ‘immigrants’. Astonishingly, despite the temporary nature of their entry clearance, international students are also included in this category.
Therefore, when a new immigration policy was announced by the coalition government that aimed at reducing the number of the immigrants to “tens of thousands”, it was widely feared that this could only be accomplished by significantly cutting down on the number of international students arriving in the UK for higher education.
Over the years, international students have become a critical part of the higher education sector in the UK by not only contributing £2bn per annum, but also enriching campus life while adding to the diversity and multiculturalism in the country. These students were therefore very much valued and most universities competed to attract the best available international students from as many countries as possible.

Quick recap: Times Higher Education, for a change, kept its methodology stable two years in a row. That means that for once, it’s okay to compare data across years. But – shock! Horror! – Canada’s three standard-bearers all fell in the rankings – U of T from 19th to 21st, UBC from 22nd to 30th and McGill from 28th to 34th. Cue the usual suspects grasping for an opportunity to talk about underfunding. “This is a wake-up call, we need to invest more in select institutions, we’re falling behind, fifth horsemen of the apocalypse,” etc. etc.
But if anyone is bothered to actually look at the data, they’d see it’s almost all nonsense. Both Toronto and McGill actually scored higher in the rankings this year than last; UBC fell, but only by a tenth of a percentage point. The reason the three fell is because others rose faster.

Between 2008 and July 1, 2012 the Government of Canada introduced many changes to policies affecting immigration, temporary entry to Canada, and citizenship. The government also changed the way in which reform was undertaken, including a dramatic increase in ministerial powers and the use of omnibus legislation. Based on recent federal announcements, it is clear that this unprecedented pace and scope of change will continue.
This paper describes the changes and analyzes their potential individual and cumulative impact. While some of the changes are positive, the authors conclude that the future of Canada will be negatively affected by the recent emphasis on short-term labour market needs, the lack of evidence-based policies, a retreat from traditional democratic processes, and a less welcoming environment for immigrants and refugees.

New modelling from the International Education Association of Australia predicts the downturn in Australia’s international education industry will get worse before it gets better, taking almost a decade to recover and threatening further jobs

The EU's Erasmus student exchange programme along with various social welfare schemes are nearly broke after cuts made to the 2012 budget by austerity-driven member states, a top lawmaker said Tuesday.
French conservative member of the European Parliament, Alain Lamassoure, who heads the budget committee, said that "the European social fund is bankrupt and can't refund member states.

According to figures released Monday, enrolments grew 19% in 2011-12 to nearly 6,000, up from 5,000 in 2010-11. However, viewed since 2008 the increase is more than 70%.
Ms Christiane Schlottmann, DAAD’s director, said: “Many students are seeking new destinations in Europe and even Asia itself, and various factors like stringent visa rules, lack of employment opportunities after graduation and social threats in the traditionally popular destinations affect this trend.”

If Ukraine is to catch up economically with the outside world, it needs good education. In many ways, Ukraine’s education sector is its strongest part of the economy, but the best parts of the Ukrainian education system are dwindling remnants of the Soviet system, notably basic education in mathematics, and science.
The worst is the quality of doctoral education. For management training, theWorld Economic Forum ranks Ukraine 116 out of 142 nations. The situation is similarly bad in economics, law and languages, as is evident from the excellent public debate in Zerkalo Nedeli and a report by CASE.
Depressingly, Education Minister Dmitry Tabachnik could hardly care less about the real problems in Ukrainian education - corruption, over-regulation, waste and poor quality. His endeavor to sovietize Ukrainian historiography and promote russification attracts most attention. His greatest “reform” has been to reduce ordinary school from the European standard of 12 to 11, seemingly inspired by the destruction instigated by the late Turkmenbashi.

The rights of international students residing in Australia are a significant concern for the Australian Human Rights Commission. International students have a discernable set of human rights including the right to non discrimination, equality of treatment, security of the person, access to justice, housing, information, freedom of religion and culture, and labour rights.
In November 2009 members of the Australian and New Zealand Race Relations Roundtable met with expert race experts and international students and their representatives to explore existing issues and identify ways forward. The Roundtable produced a Communiqué regarding these issues.
In March 2010, the Commission in partnership with the Academy of Social Sciences and Universities Australia convened the Racism and the Student Experience Policy Research Workshop. The purpose of the Workshop was to discuss what reliable data existed around (I) racially motivated violence in Australia and (II) strategies to improve the safety of international students residing in Australia.